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Monday, August 19, 2013

Sally Hansen Sugar Coat Second Release Skittle Swatches

You may recall that several months back I did a Texture Week, with swatches and comparisons of textured polishes from a bunch of different brands. Well, textures are still hot, and I've got plenty of recent collections to share, so today's post will kick off another texture week here at Frazzle and Aniploish. Let's call this one Fall Texture Week 2013, even though it's not yet fall and some of the polishes I'll be featuring have been out for a while so aren't even part of autumn collections. Oh well, sometimes things just can't make sense.

Today's textures are from Sally Hansen, in the form of the second release of Sugar Coat colors. It only seemed fair to start with Sally Hansen this time, as I wasn't able to include the brand in my first Texture Week, as the initial offering of Sugar Coat hit stores a bit later than some of the other brands' textured offerings. This second group of Sugar Coat colors first appeared around here at Walgreens but since have started to show up at CVS and Meijer and other places. There are eight colors in this group as well, split evenly between textured cremes and textured shimmers. First up, the cremes: Spare A Mint (teal), Candy Corn (orange), Laughie Taffy (navy blue), and Gummy Grape (purple).

If you've seen other textured cremes, it won't surprise you to see how these four look on the nail. Below I've swatched them in the same order as the bottle shot above. All are two coats. From a coverage perspective, I probably could have stopped at one for Spare A Mint and Laughie Taffy (as an aside, I have never seen dark blue taffy), but two coats looks better from a texture perspective.

The glints of white you may notice in the photos of these aren't shimmer particles, it's just how the light is bouncing off the shiny base color.

Though these are all shimmers, they do not share the same finish or opacity. Royal Icing is four coats in the swatch below, and still some visible nail line shows through; this has pink shimmer in the sheer light turquoise base. Treat-Heart is three coats; this has more of a metallic, silvery shimmer. Pink Sprinkle is also three coats in the swatch below; its got small shimmer particles that match the base color and larger ones that are closer to true red. I could make a case for calling this one a glitter rather than a shimmer. Red Velvet has a subtle almost pearly shimmer; you can see it better in the post Lacquer Reverie did featuring this color.

Of course I had to try the shimmers with topcoat. Pink Sprinkle was the most transformed; the larger red particles came to the forefront and it looked very glossy. The other three still looked rather lumpy, though the did feel smooth after the topcoat (sort of like how the Fuzzy Coat look bumpy but really aren't).

Since Royal Icing was so sheer, I decided that meant it was a layering polish, so tried one coat of it over Red Velvet, Spare A Mint, Laughie Taffy, and Gummy Grape. It certainly made those colors more interesting to look at and brought out some golden glints from Royal Icing that weren't obvious when I wore it on its own.

I went ahead and topcoated these combinations—though if I had intended to do this from the start, I would have just used non-textured cremes as bases for Royal Icing.

There are some interesting colors here, including shades we haven't seen in textured polish before from other brands. If I could only have one, it'd be Royal Icing, not to wear on its own but to use as a topper.